The 1%
January 8th, 2015
People really seem to latch on the the concept of 1%. In daily life 1% is taken to mean “very little”. I’ve noticed that many people have a cognitive gap when the numbers get very large. “1%” continues to be perceived as “very little”. Reality quickly veers off from perception.
In the United States – especially since 2011 – we’ve been hearing about “the 1%”. The US has 300 million people, give or take. Our “1%” is about 3 million people.
How big is 3 million people? It’s enough to populate a city the size of Chicago or L.A.. Or two Manhattans.
1% of the world population is about 70 million people. That’d be a country on par with the UK or Germany.
Here are some comments I saw on Youtube today:
“less than 1% are terrorists and fanatics.”
“Those were not 1% , those were a LOT of people.”
%1 of 1 billion = 10 million. Set aside what they are discussing; it’s clear that neither of these people understood that they were talking about 10 million.
What is it that makes “1%” not scale in our minds?